From U.S. Pat. No. 5,734,719, a system for accessing digital information over a computer network is known. The system contains a master server which is situated geographically so as to be accessible to network subscribers. Its geographic and network location is dependent upon communication network systems and subsystem cost and availability in order to best serve a customer's premise, whether it is a retail store or similar point-of-sale or other end-user-location. Security mechanisms that require centralized database authorization prior to the transmission of content and/or the manufacture of any of the products is provided in addition.
New media data extends traditional computer data formats into more natural data formats for the interaction of humans and computers by incorporating images, motion pictures, voice, audio and video. One of the key problems with new media data is transferring the usually huge amounts of content through a network.
A stream server requires all data to be streamed to reside locally on the stream server. The connection bandwidth to the rendering client (media player) has to fulfill at least the requirements corresponding to the nature of the data to be transmitted. For this reason stream servers are placed on so called edge servers (the edge of the network in the connection path to the client; also referred to as the “last mile”).
In order to initiate a streaming operation streaming meta data needs to be provided to the renderer client (media player) requesting the stream. The meta data or meta file usually contains at least an identification (key) of the media data to be streamed and the identification of the stream server e.g. the TCP/IP host name of the stream server machine and the port the stream server software listens to.
When a user wants to have media streamed to his client he normally “clicks” on a hyperlink identifying the media on the web page presented to him through his web browser. The web browser generates a http request containing the media identification information. As a response to that the application server sends the media meta data to the client's web browser. Based on that information the web browser typically invokes the corresponding media player which resides on a client and is responsible to receive the meta data from the network, negotiate connection to the stream server, receive and to render the data in parallel.
The way streaming technology is realized today, media players are only able to render streams from a corresponding stream server usually built by the same company. Examples of such charger player, Apple quick time, Microsoft MediaServer/MediaPLayer and Real Networks G2 server/player.
From Mourad a et al: ‘scalable web server architectures’ proceedings IEEE international symposium on computers and communications, XX, XX, 1 Jul. 1997 (1997-07-01), pages 12-16, XP000199852 it is known to provide more flexibility in load balancing and additional reliability by replication of content on multiple servers. If there is replication of data, a logical file name is mapped to multiple URLs on different servers. In this case, the redirection server has to chose one of the servers containing the relevant data Intelligent strategies for choosing the servers can be implemented to better balance the load among the HTTP servers. It is however a disadvantage of this approach that implementing data replication will require modifying the data structure containing the mapping information.
A common problem of the prior art data transfer protocols, in particular streaming protocols over a computer network, such as the Internet, is the bandwidth required to perform a streaming operation.